Andrea Leahy always had kind of a split personality: one side pianist, the other side lawyer. That split was evident even before she graduated from The Catholic University of America in 1983 with a double major of music and politics.
“My mom and dad started teaching me to play the piano when I was three,” remembers Leahy, adding that her father was a lawyer himself. “One of my earliest memories is that middle C was Mama Bear and high C was Baby Bear.”
But while Leahy dreamed of being a concert pianist professionally, a summer spent as a guest student at Mozarteum University’s music academy in Salzburg, Austria, plus time spent among pianists in Russia, changed her mind. “I met all of these fabulous pianists who were all out of work,” she says. “I loved music too much to be struggling with it as a profession; I wanted to just enjoy playing.” As a result, she earned her law degree in 1987 from American University’s Washington College of Law.
Leahy has still found ways to combine her two passions. Instead of doing Law Review, for example, she gave a piano concert and went on a concert tour with her teacher. And while she is now an associate judge at large in the Appellate Court of Maryland, she has also formed a little band comprised of other judges, law clerks, and the like that performs at the court’s holiday party.
Leahy was appointed to the Appellate Court in 2014. She is chair-elect of the Judicial Ethics Committee and a member of the Judicial Transparency and Access Workgroup. She has served as a member of the Legislative Committee, the Specialty Courts and Dockets Committee, and on subcommittees focused on mental health, alcoholism and addictions, and behavioral health.
Leahy began her career as an assistant county attorney in Prince George’s County Office of Law, in Maryland, where she met County Executive Parris Glendening. When Glendening was elected Maryland’s governor in 1995, he hired Leahy to the role of chief counsel to the governor. After five years of advising the governor, Leahy became an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland. Before becoming a judge, she was of counsel in the Business Litigation Division of Whiteford, Taylor & Preston LLP from 2001 to 2006 and a managing member of Leahy & DeSmet LLC from 2006 to 2014.
One of Leahy’s most recent contributions to Maryland’s legal community is her work to establish the Cole-Davidson American Inn of Court in Annapolis. “One of Parris Glendening’s progressive initiatives was to diversify Maryland’s judiciary, and he put me in charge of organizing various components of that effort,” Leahy says. “That experience informed some of the ideas I had when forming the Cole-Davidson Inn.”
Leahy chaired the organizing committee for the Inn, which was established in 2022. “For years we had been discussing the lack of diversity among lawyers who practice appellate law in appellate court,” she says. “I think we are one of the few Inns whose mission is really focused on diversifying the appellate bar and bench.” From 2018 to 2019, Leahy served as president of the Hon. James Macgill American Inn of Court in Columbia, Maryland. She was a member of the J. Dudley Digges American Inn of Court in Baltimore from 2002 to 2014.
Leahy is active within the legal community more broadly. A member of the Maryland State Bar Association, she is also a fellow of the Maryland Bar Association and the American Bar Foundation. Leahy also chaired a project that brought judges, lawyers, and academics together to uncover and publish the history of women in Maryland law. The project culminated in the book Finding Justice: A History of Women Lawyers in Maryland Since 1642.
At home, Leahy has passed on her love of music to her kids, just as her parents did for her. “I schlepped my two daughters to music lessons,” she says. Both can play the piano; one also plays the violin and the other plays the cello. Although Leahy has not had a lot of time to play with them since becoming a judge, she says, “We play trios together.”